Outside the bubbles: Motta plays (literally) among the fans

At the entrance to the Hacienda there are posters hanging from the ceiling with the lines of Motta’s songs written on them: “At the bottom of the sea I am lost, like fish in the universe”, “The music is too loud, can speak”, “I took my peace of mind and drank it in”. In the distance, the buzz of those who have already taken their seats in the room. As soon as you enter, you have the feeling of being in a situation halfway between artistic performance and installation In the center of the room some carpets make up a circle around which lighthouses and speakers have been positioned, connected to the instruments in the middle.

The intention is clear: it is .that of not being on a pedestal compared to the public, but in the middle of to the public itself. Literally bringing music back to the centre. When at 9.40pm Motta appears together with Roberta Sammarelli, Cesare Petulicchio and Giorgio Maria Condemithe companions that the former Criminal Jokers wanted at his side for this challenge, the musicians go to take their places behind the instruments avoiding any form of stardom. And they immediately start playing, without too much chatter, honoring the slogan chosen by Motta for his new recording project: “Suona”, simple and clear. “I change my wings, I go higher, I listen to the wind that pushes me slowly”, sings the Tuscan rocker in “I change my face”, the first song in the setlist, an ideal declaration of intent that seems to embody the air of revolution in the artist’s universe, which eight years after his debut with “La fine dei vent’anni” – has become a classic of Italian songwriting contemporary – in this phase of his career he decided to look for little-traveled paths in which to run free, taking his time and his space. The audience, all around the musicians, listens in silence. As in a secular rite.

And ultimately the concert wants to be exactly this: a secular ritual in which everything revolves around the power, passion and often conflicting feelings that that great instrument called music has the ability to exert on every individual. It’s aalternative to the depersonalizing gigantism that now reigns in live music, between giant screens, giant stages, famous guests and so on, in which the artist is light years away from the fans not only physically. Social presenteeism, then, offers only a semblance of closeness to the characters, whose virtual presence actually hides an underlying unattainability: they are of the gods alone and dissociated, living inside bubbles. Motta bursts his bubble when on “

Rome tonight” he takes the microphone and throws himself among the people, among those who throw him this way and that: “I like disgust, the smell of people”, he sings. That’s where he wants to be now: mixed among people. When he wrote it he had already moved to Rome for a few years, having arrived in the capital to study film music composition at the Experimental Center on the Tuscolana, leaving behind him provincial life and the adventures with the group with which he had begun to work. meet the Criminal Jokers on the indie circuit. He was a pure man, who that genius Riccardo Sinigallia took under his protective wing and molded, showing him the way. Today, four albums, a Sanremo (that of “Dov’è l’Italia”, which has now disappeared from his setlists, gone like this and like that) and a few thousand kilometers traveled in a van later, it is to that purity that Motta seems to need to return.

“Hello to all friends. If there is someone who wants to come on stage with us there are no problems. We are naked and raw. But above all naked”, he says.

“The next song is called ‘Play’. We recorded it for a record that we sell out here for merchandising,” he adds, amused and enthusiastic as perhaps he hasn’t been in a while. The title of the album, the first release by Sona Music Records, the record label he has just founded, is “a clear reference to when I started playing”, explains Motta: “I was lucky enough to grow up in a province full of musicians which not only helped me to improve, but also to try not to talk too much during concerts, given that one more word could have been silenced by a unanimous shout: ‘Sona’, exactly”. And the band plays. Here’s how it sounds. The bass of Roberta Sammarelli, the iconic bassist of Verdena, makes the ground and walls of the Hacienda tremble. Cesare Petulicchio’s drums, already in Bud Spencer Blues Explosion, fill the room. Giorgio Maria Condemi’s guitar makes the air electric. .The audience dances and goes wild, they feel an active part of the show, of the ritual.

The concert takes on the contours of a free and psychedelic live experience, full of the punk attitude that characterizes the project (tonight the encore, again in Rome; then on 27 and 28 November it will be at the Base in Milan), in which the dimension of the concert and that of the recording studio merge with each other ‘other, even in imperfections. Above all, in the imperfections. The album sounds like we’re at a concert and the concert feels like a studio session, a liturgy that would not be the same without the presence of the audience around the musicians When at a certain point he asks the fans to sit down, he starts “La fine dei twenty years”: he sings it – and plays it – in an extremely intense version, on the piano.

“.I see enthusiastic faces, puzzled faces and enthusiastic but puzzled faces”, he smiles. “Do you have questions?”, asks Motta to the fans, as if it were a theater show from the 70s, with annex debate (“No, no debate!”, Nanni Moretti would say). He repeats it several times during the concert, among the various “Del tempo che passa la happiness”, “Who knows where you will be”, “You are truly beautiful”, “We won another war” and also “Bestie”, one of the songs of the Criminal Jokers’ repertoire. On “Alice” he arrives as a surprise Giovanni Truppi. But it’s acollective hallucinationwhich lasts less than a minute: then it disappears, exactly as it appeared. From nothing, into nothing.

On “And it’s almost like being happy” Motta returns to wander around the audience with a menacing grin: “What does he want to do?”, the curious looks of the spectators seem to say. Who, when in doubt, dance, letting themselves be carried away by the flow of the music, by the creative flow of the band, which has as its ultimate goal that of making music for the pleasure of making it, in total freedom. Suddenly it also appears Damage to the Colle der Fomentoicon of the Roman rap scene: “He is one of the most important people for me, he helped me write many lyrics,” says Motta. Together they sing “Minotaur”, the song that the Tuscan singer-songwriter composed for the soundtrack of the film “The Cage”, between inhospitable and violent places, labyrinths and prisons, whose intensity represents the culmination of the ritual: “And now I beat the drum, I wake up the tribe, they shaman / I sing a war song, Indian chief / look for me in the ego of a distant sound”, raps Danno. Then before leaving the stage he says: “And in the end whether you have the questions or not is not important: we want the answers.” The ritual is over: Motta has found his peace again.